The great challenge for the arts now is to dig deeper into the ideas that can animate change and rebuild society, bringing those ideas to life for people.

Thinking about the future of human society has brought Nicolas, the financier at the top of the Wall Street pyramid, back to his childhood passion: philosophy. He draws inspiration from traditional Chinese culture and philosophy.

1% of China’s population owns 31% of the wealth. Closing such a wealth gap can best be done by fostering an ownership stake by all in China’s future prosperity.

How distrust in government costs lives.

A book excerpt and interview with Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen, authors of “Renovating Democracy”

The world may turn bleak without good governance. “A new dark age could descend in some regions where tyrants abuse their subjects and where jihadists or criminal gangs roam freely to terrorise dispossessed populations.” Or so say Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen in “Renovating Democracy.”

The prevalence of a fairly recent idea — that government is an “unnecessary evil” which should get out of the way — has in some ways unleashed the most robust private sector in the world. But purveyors of that belief run the risk of failing to recognize that the U.S. private sector is built and modeled upon the early platform of state investments.

The frenzy around Bitcoin obscures the fact that blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies, is a much more general-purpose technology, one that holds the potential to revolutionize far more than just currency markets.

It must have a narrative, plan, leadership and organization.

As the “rise of the rest” challenges Western dominance, the political imagination may again be open to new ideas. This time, it won’t be just Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.

If we are aiming for a mutualistic relationship, then, strange as it may sound, maybe the healthiest way to look at AI is as we do our children.

2020 has been a challenging and consequential year: a global pandemic, a contested U.S. Presidential Election, an evolving economic crisis, historic social unrest, and a raging climate calamity.